Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

Kind of ironic because I can't find any RSS feed linked on this site (apart from in the blog post itself). Not even my RSS reader picks up that he even has a RSS feed. Bit odd to be commenting on others not having RSS on their site if his own site doesn't properly support it either.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#5

Post by sylk » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 6:59 PM UTC

I think the worse RSS isn't in not having RSS, it's when they say "Hey here's a preview of what we wrote."

I really enjoy reading content on my terms on not having to go everywhere to get it. It makes my life much more peaceful.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#6

Post by bad_user » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 6:59 PM UTC

I follow many blogs, many of them of individual developers and if you're not on Wordpress or Medium (ugh), then the next common choice is a static website generator like Jekyll or equivalent.

Some of them don't have RSS feeds.

But I just contact them privately and kindly ask them to add an RSS feed.

Most of my requests had positive results, since you just need to integrate a plugin [1] or copy a pre-made atom.xml template, like one of my own [2] but any one will do.

Of course you can go down a rabbit whole in optimizing the CSS, like I usually do, until I decide that a freaking summary of those articles is enough in the RSS feed and be done with it. But that's totally optional.

And if you're doing it manually, don't forget to add a meta tag in the of all your pages, like:

[1] https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-feed

[2] https://github.com/monix/monix.io/blob/master/blog/atom.xml

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#7

Post by gjstein » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 7:00 PM UTC

Easy enough to support this article; RSS is good for the open web and relatively trivial to support: took me maybe an hour for my personal blog, compared to the enormous effort I've put into CSS and formatting for the website proper. I'd love to get a feeling for how many folks here have a blog with RSS support and what the relative level of traffic is between RSS and other forms of traffic. Does anyone have statistics they'd care to share?

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#8

Post by Xavdidtheshadow » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

Totally! It makes content so easy to track. I try to use Twitter a little bit for this, but most accounts post lots of other tweets in addition to "new post", so I have to spend time trying to guess which hashtags they might use to denote actual posts.

Separately, I really like JSONFeed https://jsonfeed.org/2017/05/17/announcing_json_feed. It's the same idea as RSS, but in JSON instead of XML. I find it a much easier format to work with and I really wish JSON as a feed structure had caught on more.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#9

Post by kgwxd » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

I don't subscribe to anything via any other means. No need to give any personal info; no risk of spam filtering; I can apply my own filters to content; everything in 1 place.

I've seen some site owner say it allows nefarious players to grab their content, post it as their own, and get it index by Google before they do. But that problem should be solved by Google, we should't cripple the web because of it.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#10

Post by nickthegreek » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 7:02 PM UTC

Fogest wrote: post #4

Kind of ironic because I can't find any RSS feed linked on this site (apart from in the blog post itself). Not even my RSS reader picks up that he even has a RSS feed. Bit odd to be commenting on others not having RSS on their site if his own site doesn't properly support it either.

looks like he added a link to his RSS (https://kevq.uk/feed) at the end of the article, but like you, my RSS reader was unable to locate it naturally.